Physically, Eleanor wasn’t coy like me; she didn’t conceal desire; there was no shame. At any time she’d take my hand and lay it on her breasts, pressing my fingers around the nipple, which I rolled and pinched. Or she’d pull up her T-shirt and offer me her tit to suck, forcing it into my mouth with her fingers. Or she pushed my hand up her skirt, wanting to be touched. Sometimes we snorted coke, speed, or swallowed hash, and I stripped Eleanor on the sofa, pulling off each piece of clothing until she was naked, with her legs apart, while I was dressed. Eleanor was also the first person to illustrate the magic qualities of language during sex. Her whispers stole my breath away: she required a fucking, a stuffing, a sucking, a slapping, in this, that or the other way. Sex was different each time. It had a different pace, there were new caresses, kisses which lasted an hour, sudden copulations in odd places – behind garages or in trains – where we’d simply pull down our clothes. At other times sex lasted aeons, when I’d lie with my head between her legs lapping her cunt and rimming her as she held herself open for me with her fingers.
There were occasions when I looked at Eleanor and felt such love – her face and entire being seemed luminous – that I couldn’t bear the strength of it and had to turn away. I didn’t want to feel this deeply: the disturbance, the possession. Sex I loved; like drugs, it was play, headiness. I’d grown up with kids who taught me that sex was disgusting. It was smells, smut, embarrassment and horse laughs. But love was too powerful for me. Love swam right into the body, into the valves, muscles and bloodstream, while sex, the prick, was always outside. I did want then, in a part of myself, to dirty the love I felt, or, somehow, to extract it from the body.
I needn’t have worried. My love was souring already. I was terrified Eleanor would tell me she had fallen for someone else, or would declare she was bored with me. Or I wasn’t good enough for her. The usual.
Fear entered my life. It entered my work. In the suburbs there had been few things that seemed more petty than the fear everyone had of their neighbour’s opinion. It was why my mother could never hang out the washing in the garden without combing her hair. I didn’t give a shit about what those people thought; but now it was essential to me that Pyke and Tracey and the other others liked my acting. My status in the group was not high now, and I felt discouraged. I didn’t even talk to Eva about what I was doing.
At night, at home, I was working on Changez’s shambolic walk and crippled hand, and on the accent, which I knew would sound, to white ears, bizarre, funny and characteristic of India. I’d worked out a story for the Changez character (now called Tariq), eagerly arriving at Heathrow with his gnat-ridden suitcase, having been informed in Bombay by a race-track acquaintance that you merely had to whisper the word ‘undress’ in England and white women would start slipping out of their underwear.
If there were objections to my portrayal I would walk out of the rehearsal room and go home. Thus, in a spirit of bloody-minded defiance I prepared to perform my Tariq for the group. On the day, in that room by the river, the group sat in a half-circle to watch me. I tried not to look at Tracey, who sat leaning forward concentratedly. Richard and Jon sat back without expression. Eleanor smiled encouragingly at me. Pyke nodded, note-book on his knee; Louise Lawrence had her writing pad and five sharp pencils at the ready. And Carol sat in the lotus position, putting her head back and stretching unconcernedly.
When I finished there was silence. Everybody seemed to be waiting for someone else to speak. I looked around the faces: Eleanor was amused but Tracey had an objection coming on. Her arm was half-raised. I would have to leave. It was the thing I most dreaded, but I’d made up my mind. But somehow Pyke saw this coming too. He pointed at Louise, instructing her to start writing.
‘There it is,’ Pyke said. ‘Tariq comes to England, meets an English journalist on the plane – played by Eleanor, no, by Carol. This is real quality, upper-class crumpet. He is briefly among the upper classes because of her, which gives us another area to examine! Girls fall for him all over the place because of his weakness and need to be mothered. So. We have class, race, fucking and farce. What more could you want as an evening’s entertainment?’
Tracey’s face was well and truly shut. I wanted to kiss Pyke.
‘Well done,’ he said to me.
Mostly the actors adored Matthew. After all, he was a complex, attractive man, and they owed him a bagful. Naturally, I was as sycophantic towards Pyke as the others, but underneath I was sceptical and liked to keep my distance. I put this scepticism down to my South London origins, where it was felt that anyone who had an artistic attitude – anyone, that is, who’d read more than fifty books, or could pronounce Mallarmé correctly or tell the difference between Camembert and Brie – was basically a charlatan, snob or fool.
I really wasn’t too intimate with Pyke until one day my bike chain snapped and he started to drive me back from rehearsals in his sports car, a black machine with black leather seats which shot you along on your back about three inches above the surface of the road. There was a clear view of the sky through the open roof. This module had speakers in the doors to crash the Doors and anything by Jefferson Airplane over you. In the privacy of his own car Pyke liked to ruminate on sex at such length and in such detail that I felt that the telling of these stories was an integrally erotic aspect of the serious promiscuous life. Or perhaps it was because I’d been sexualized by Eleanor. Maybe my skin, eyes and body-tone shone with carnal awareness, teasing out sensual thoughts in others.
One of the first things Pyke said, the introduction to his character as it were, when we first began to talk, was this. ‘When I was nineteen, Karim, I swore to dedicate myself to two things: to becoming a brilliant director and to sleeping with as many women as I could.’
I was surprised to find him naïve enough to boast of such desires. But, looking straight ahead of him as he drove, he talked of his hobbies: attending orgies and New York fuck-clubs; and of the pleasure of finding unusual locations for the usual act, and unusual people to perform it with.
For Marlene and Matthew, who were created by the 1960s and had the money and facilities to live out their fantasies in the 1970s, sex was both recreational and informative. ‘We get to meet such interesting people,’ Pyke said. ‘Where else but in a New York fuck-club would you get to meet a hairdresser from Wisconsin?’
Marlene was the same. She was fucking a Labour MP and passing on to her dialectical friends gossip and information about the House of Commons and the rank machinations of the Labour Party.
One of Pyke’s most recent adventures was with a policewoman, the fascination of which didn’t lie in the woman’s character – there was little of that – but in the uniform; and predominantly in the functioning of the Filth, the details of which she recounted to Pyke after fellatio. But Pyke was tiring of what he described as his ‘legal period’. ‘I’m on the look-out for a scientist – an astronomer or nuclear physicist. I feel too arts-based intellectually.’
With their poking into life’s odd corners, Pyke and Marlene seemed to me to be more like intrepid journalists than swimmers in the sensual. Their desire to snuggle up to real life betrayed a basic separation from it. And their obsession with how the world worked just seemed another form of self-obsession. Not that I informed Pyke of this analysis: I merely listened with flared ears and panting lungs. I wanted to get closer to him. I was excited. The world was opening out. I’d never met anyone like this before.
During one of these truth sessions in the car after rehearsal, when I was exhaustedly happy with the feeling of having worked hard, Pyke turned to me with one of the generous smiles which I found so insidious. ‘Hey, you should know I’m pleased with your contribution to the show. The character you’ve got going is going to be a big laugh. So I’ve decided to give you a very special present.’